British Horror Film Presents: Quatermass and the Pit (1967)

[Come out to our final film in the supplementary Brit Horror sequence - starting in January, Erik and I are on to the cinema of the long '70s, including - gasp - things that are not horror in any sense of the generic word.]

You realise what you're implying? That we owe our human condition here to the intervention of insects?

The third Hammer adaptation of a Nigel Kneale-written, BBC-produced Quatermass television series (but the first film version with a British Quatermass), Quatermass and the Pit is in some reckonings the single best Quatermass entry in Hammer’s trilogy. While doing work on the London Underground, workers uncover a strange vessel that looks like it could be an unexploded German rocket, but a closer look reveals that it likely fell onto Great Britain from a place a good deal farther away than the continent and at a time much longer ago than World War II. The Quatermass series is revered in no small part because it consistently advances the claim that mankind itself is already the alien threat that it most fears, but none of these films gets that thesis across with quite the eerie force that this one does. Not to be missed.